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Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

wsj.com

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Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#151

Post by tjpnz »

donatj wrote: post #18

I don't understand the way their enforcement works. I've reported videos of people literally setting live animals on fire and been told there was no violation, but my wife called someone a "loser" and got a week long ban.

This is also the same company that allowed a terrorist to livestream a killing spree for 17 minutes despite it being reported over and over again. To add insult to injury they allowed copies of the same footage to proliferate across their platform for weeks.

Facebook spend a lot on PR talking up their AI capabilities and how it's being applied towards moderation. Would be nice if it actually worked.

Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#153

Post by logicalmonster »

sdrawkcabmai wrote: post #53
dogleash wrote: post #21

>“We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly,” said the confidential review. Why do we even have the collective fiction where corporate messaging around a sore topic is treated as trustworthy? Especially with companies that we know lie all the fucking time?

Why out of the largest tech companies, like Amazon, Google, Netflix, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Twitter (well not large but similar to FB in terms of social network) only one has a reputation for constantly lying and misleading people on purpose in its self-interest? Is it because we pay more attention to FB or is it because FB is different in some way?

> Is it because we pay more attention to FB or is it because FB is different in some way?

Facebook probably has the most well-known face of any of these companies in Mark Zuckerberg. And one difference between Mark and other typical cut-throat business leaders is that he's got a reputation for being weirdly socially awkward in a noticeable way to the extent that there's numerous memes about him being a robot or alien.

Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, and others might be similarly ruthless or worse entrepreneurs, but they don't come across as the same level of creepy even though they also want to own your data, put cameras and microphones in your house, just as much as Facebook.

Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#154

Post by gkop »

nindalf wrote: post #110

Huh, never thought I’d see XCheck in a news article. I used to work at Facebook and spotted abuse of this system by bad actors and partly fixed it. It’s still not perfect but it’s better than it used to be. I think I might have agreed with the author of this article before working in Integrity for a few years. But with time I learned that any system that’s meant to work for millions of users will have some edge cases…

Your analogy relating to Zuckerberg is absurdly tone deaf.

Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#155

Post by WriterGuy2021 »

dogleash wrote: post #21

>“We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly,” said the confidential review. Why do we even have the collective fiction where corporate messaging around a sore topic is treated as trustworthy? Especially with companies that we know lie all the fucking time?

That's not the only collective fiction that's problematic. At this point, the lies are the only thing keeping everything going.

Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#156

Post by elzbardico »

whatshisface wrote: post #137
metalliqaz wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, better to listen to someone with unknown credentials on Substack, or whatever I dig up on Facebook. That will put the MSM in their place. By the way did you know that hydroxychloroquine does cure COVID, if you also take it with tons of Zinc? Big Pharma (TM) doesn't want you to know.

Let's not overestimate the critical thinking skill advantage separating journalists from other people. I can check the citations as well as any editor, sometimes better because I know some things about math and have no reason to be biased. When there's no scene to be at with a camera and nobody is getting interviewed, I just don't see what the media has to add. Spending years pouring over account records? Interviewin…

Most journalists nowadays seem pretty gullible and hard set on their preconceived world views. I fail to see any advantage in critical thinking skills on the media class.

Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#157

Post by GeekyBear »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #82
sdrawkcabmai wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why out of the largest tech companies, like Amazon, Google, Netflix, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Twitter (well not large but similar to FB in terms of social network) only one has a reputation for constantly lying and misleading people on purpose in its self-interest? Is it because we pay more attention to FB or is it because FB is different in some way?

In this particular case, it's only Facebook and Twitter that are significant social networks and they are responsible for the biggest spread of misinformation. Google is a close third, if you hold Google responsible for its own search results (and not the websites they link to which their algorithm considers most important). I mean I think they're all overgrown capitalist machines that thirst for their users' data, m…

> Google is a close third, if you hold Google responsible for its own search results (and not the websites they link to which their algorithm considers most important).

If you include the videos that YouTube recommends, they pull even with Facebook and Twitter.

They are all optimizing for the ability of content to keep eyeballs glued to the screen (so they can show more ads), and nothing else.

>in Google’s effort to keep people on its video platform as long as possible, “its algorithm seems to have concluded that people are drawn to content that is more extreme than what they started with—or to incendiary content in general,” and adds, “It is also possible that YouTube’s recommender algorithm has a bias toward inflammatory content.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/youtube...

Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#158

Post by caseysoftware »

pmyteh wrote: post #142
hunterb123 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many discussions are explicitly about what S230 ought to be though, not what it is. Most discussions I've seen start out by stating it was made for a 1996 bulletin board and is dated. It's long overdue to handle this blanket immunity that's being abused by social media behemoths. You don't have to be a lawyer to know something is a bad law and something is being abused.

Sure. And people writing 's.230 allows Facebook to have its cake and eat it, by allowing them to control their content and yet have immunity from responsibility for that which they choose to leave up' have a point. But there's an awful lot of people arguing that this or that moderation decision means that Facebook 'have now moved from being a platform to a publisher' and should be sued. Normally when Facebook have ta…

Thanks for the additional context.

As written, nothing changes with this not-revelation, revelation with respect to Section 230. It does recolor some of their statements about consistent treatment and enforcement but those are other matters.

Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#159

Post by shadowgovt »

josefresco wrote: post #88
donatj wrote: post #18

I don't understand the way their enforcement works. I've reported videos of people literally setting live animals on fire and been told there was no violation, but my wife called someone a "loser" and got a week long ban.

My wife (an American) also got flagged for saying "Americans are selfish". She then made a post about our RV (camper) asking about sewer "hook ups" at a campground and was flagged for posting what looked like a sex ad. We (the kids and I) now lovingly call her "hate speech Mom".

Especially after Jan 6, there are a couple of things you can say in an ordinary spirited political debate that will cop you a ban on FB. One is several flavors of "Americans are X," another is variants on "Kill the filibuster" (which I assume is pattern-matching to '[violence-word] the [congress-word], which they probably up-sampled in the threat modeling for, uh, obvious reasons).

Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#160

Post by jcranmer »

criddell wrote: post #143
pmyteh wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. All that s.230 does is declare that platforms are not the 'publisher or speaker' of content provided by another 'information content provider'. It isn't a common carrier provision, so platforms are allowed to make whatever decisions they like about which people they're willing to host, or what TOS/AUP they want to enforce. For such a simple provision, it's astonishing how many people are writing bad (and sometime…

In what sense is Facebook not a publisher? Their algorithm acts as an editor, choosing what to show me. If they had a simple chronological feed, then the platform argument would make sense. If the NYT created a service where the articles I see were selected algorithmically, would they suddenly not be a publisher?

The "publisher" versus "platform" distinction is 100% a made-up distinction to motivate bad §230 takes.

What §230 does, very simply, is say that websites posting user-generated content are not liable for that content, even if they moderate the content. It was passed in response to a pair of court decisions that concluded that a website that moderated content (including, for example, weeding out profanity or pornography) was liable for all content posted, and a website that provided no moderation whatsoever wasn't liable.

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